Review: Empire of the Vampire

Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There's a reason why Jay Kristoff's one of my faves, and it's because he's one of the most bloody rockstarinest writers in the biz. But you know what the bloody hell else he is? Like Pierce Brown, he is an Apex Asshole, capable of plundering the depths of his imagination and holding a mirror up to the world in the darkest of ways, and taking us readers on a long, perilous journey through a fantasy world where the sun won't rise and vampires rule.

Though I do somewhat miss the days of the infamously overlong footnotes of Nevernight and sequels, I do appreciate Kristoff taking a bit more out of the Patrick Rothfuss playbook, having our protagonist recount his life's tale, after a fashion. At least one part told in a single night, seemingly, as impossible as it might be given the vast length of this nearly 750-page brick. (And yes, among all the other references buried throughout this book, don't think I didn't miss that little jab at Rothfuss and how Kvothe bedded the most perfectly insane-makingly sexy faerie queene, lolol.)

As always, Kristoff presents a most creatively-built world, where strange astrophysical phenomena are the cause of all sorts of horrors - in this case, the opposite of Nevernight. Instead of three suns that almost never completely set, here's one sun that never completely rises, allowing vampires of four noble bloodlines to dominate while humans struggle to get by. And yes, Kristoff does go into detail about how difficult it is to grow crops when the sun ain't rising, leaving humankind with little recourse but to rely on root vegetables that don't need as much photosynthesis to thrive. And in this world heavily inspired by Renaissance Europe (with one country in the south somewhat more North African and Middle Eastern in style, with darker-skinned people than those of the other French and English and Scottish-inspired lands to the north), the religious angle is so steeped in Catholicism that, between this book and Nevernight, I really have to wonder if Kristoff wasn't raised Catholic like I was. The style is just everywhere, from the devotion to saints and God and Not-Jesus to the Holy Grail references, and of course the illustrations all being done in the style of stained glass windows. And I can see why James Rollins blurbed this one too, given the similarities to his and Rebecca Cantrell's own Order of the Sanguines series, complete with reformed vampires (or, more accurately, mixed-race silversaints) forming the Church's primary weapon against the vampires.

But it's not an easy road for Gabriel or the rest of the silversaints. This first book alone is a truly sprawling epic (at the end, there's an annotated map of his journey across the empire, and it zigzags all over the place from one nation to the next and back again.) Though individual parts of the story are told linearly, the overall story is organized with time jump after time jump, irregularly going back and forth throughout Gabriel's past as he jerks around the vampire historian Marquis Jean-Francois (there's a reason why so many of this book's lines went viral before it was even published!) Individual sections of the book are also liable to end with a thirty-twist pileup at a moment's notice - it wouldn't be Kristoff otherwise, would it? - and half of these completely overturn the reader's expectations like the car they were in in that pileup is the one unlucky enough to have gone over the guardrail and off the cliff.

But you know what single scene made this book one of my absolute all time favorites?

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The scene where, when Gabriel is to figure out which of the bloodlines sired him, he turns out to be a "frailblood" with no sign of any of the four bloodlines' signature powers. Quite apart from how much it imitates Divergent by presenting a system of royal houses tailor made for personality quizzes and then making the protagonist so relatably not fit into any one of them, that part where Gabriel was told he would never be good enough to be a legend among legends like the rest of the silversaints? As an autistic boy with no personality to speak of (so society thinks, anyway) that hit. Hard.

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Bloodydamn goryhell, Mister Kristoff, you really are an Apex Asshole.

Goddammit I need Book 2.

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